Virgin Mobile’s Ad-Sponsored Calling Plan

By Geoff Duncan May 30, 2006

If you can’t live without your cell phone but find your talk needs exceed your fiscal means, Virgin Mobile USA has got the program for you: SugarMama, a way to earn talk time by viewing advertisements.

SugarMama’s initial advertisers will include Pepsi, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and the truth anti-smoking campaign; under the offer, Virgin Mobile customers can earn up to 75 minutes of free calls every month if they spend a similar amount of time looking at advertisements and responding with text messages which prove they were, in fact, paying attention to the ads.

Virgin Mobile USA’s small customer base (about 4 million subscribers) skews younger than many mobile operators, with some 65 percent of their users under 30 years old. Virgin plainly hopes the plan will appeal to cash-strapped youth, who will be eager to turn over a bit of their attention for free talk time. Virgin also hopes the opportunity to push advertising to an attention-paying coveted youth demographic will be extra-appealing to advertisers

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Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

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